Norman Osborn (Earth-61610)
Norman Osborn, also known as the Green Goblin, is a superhuman criminal in Earth-61610. He was the co-founder, President and CEO of Osborn Corporations (OsCorp), as well as the leader of the organized crime movement the Goblins, before his apparent death. Biography Early Life Norman's childhood was an unhappy one. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Norman and his mother became the frequent victims of his father's verbal abuse. Norman's father, Amberson Osborn, had been a wealthy industrialist before losing control of his company, and he vented his frustration on his wife and only son as he steadily drank away their savings. Seeing his father as a failure and determined not to follow in his footsteps, Norman buried himself in his studies, proving himself a gifted chemist and engineer. He quickly began exhibiting some of the traits that earned him the label of "radical" (read: mad) scientist, with experiments that frequently were considered unsafe or unethical. These tendencies provoked the scorn of his schoolmates, and Norman found himself a social outcast and the occasional target of bullies. Never one to meekly accept such treatment, Norman was given detention for fighting classmates with alarming frequency. Nevertheless, his efforts earned him admittance the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as numerous scholarships. Seizing the opportunity to abandon his parents and start anew, Norman enrolled in MIT and quickly became one of its most talented students. During this time, he severed all communications with his parents; when informed of his father's death by the university's president at the age of twenty, he limited his response to a single word: "Good." Founding Osborn Corporations Norman worked his way through MIT's curriculum at an astonishing pace, earning a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in two years and a doctorate in five. He established a close friendship with one of his professors, Mendel Stromm, and began to date Emily Lyman, whom he eventually married. Upon graduation he worked for some time as an intern of Stark Industries; in secret, he experimented with stolen chemicals and technology, selling the resulting inventions on the black market. So it was that he built up a small wealth over several years, eventually amassing enough to found a small company in New York with the help of Prof. Stromm. Since Norman put up the bulk of the financing, the company was named Osborn Corporations, or simply OsCorp. Losing Emily The company grew considerably in status over the next several years, going from a small brick warehouse in Brooklyn to a 120-story skyscraper in Manhattan with a secondary complex upstate. Hundreds of radical scientists found work there; Mary Fitzpatrick and her eventual husband Richard Parker among the first. Several small, rival companies briefly tried to muscle in on the developing corporation, but two mysteriously went bankrupt and the rest suffered from suspicious changes in management. Even as his company and profits grew, Norman's family life was on shaky grounds. So focused was he on expanding his work that he rarely spent time with Emily (herself a respected physicist); their infant son, Harry, was cared for by a nanny. Despite this, he did love her passionately, and when she was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer, he was devastated. Immediately he poured hundreds of millions of dollars of funding into the work of Richard Parker, who had been pushing to expand cancer research in OsCorp's biology department for personal reasons. Over four years the entire Bio and Chem departments became focused on potential cures, several of which seemed extremely promising, but not within a useful time frame. At last, under extreme pressure from Norman, the departments managed to create a globulin compound that would send the cancer cells into temporary remission. With this compound they managed to briefly extend Emily's life before her immune system began to reject it entrely. With little else that could be done in time, the doctors put Emily into a medically induced coma and allowed her to die in peace. The loss of his wife nearly caused a mental breakdown in Norman. He withdrew from his company and all public appearances, allowing Stromm to temporarily take control of most of OsCorp. For a time he spiraled into alcoholism and drug use. After several months, though, he realized how much like his father he was becoming and steeled himself, renewing his vow not to repeat the man's failures. Suddenly and violently reintroducing himself into society, he framed Stromm of embezzling and had him arrested, taking full and permanent control of OsCorp. He spitefully slashed funding for any projects either of the Parkers were connected with and cut their salaries. Harry, five at the time, was confused at his father's suddenly stricter and contemptuous attitude. And, as he began establishing mob connections more concrete than those he had already had, Norman managed to bury his grief and OsCorp continued to rise. OsCorp Expo The next ten years seemed to pass quickly as Norman rose to a captain of industry and his company grew to nearly the status of a megacorporation. At some point the company became involved in SHIELD's constant work towards ever-more-powerful super soldiers, but Norman confided in only his closest associates his ulterior motives for joining the project: corporate raiders for the sabatoge of rival corporations, and the sale of superpowered bodyguards and agents in the criminal underworld. A promising lead was the Oz virus, an engineered lentivirus-marnivirus hybrid that the biology department had already used to assemble entire (albeit simple) genomes; when Bruce Banner's experimental radiation-absorbing compound was made accessible in modified form by SHIELD, Norman ordered it to be incorporated into the Oz virus experiments. Eventually Norman grew confident (or arrogant) enough to exhibit some of the company's more legitimate projects in the first ever OsCorp Expo, open to the general public. This proved a mistake as, within a week of the Expo's official opening, a shooter tried to destroy the projects and kill as many radical scientists as possible. A bad situation only became worse as Dr. Curtis Connors, the head of the genetics department, ushered his current tour group into a laboratory devoted to the super-soldier project and, when the shooter found them anyway, the work of two quick-thinking teenagers saved the geneticist's life at the cost of inadvertently destroying the spiders that had been grown using an unusual, mutated strain of the Oz virus. Norman was outraged by this loss, but, as he permantly closed the Expo, consoled himself that at least it hadn't been worse. The Emergence of Spider-Man Heh heh heh. Category:Versions of Green Goblin Category:Earth-61610 Category:CEOs Category:Osborn Corporations (Earth-61610) Category:Villains